We had a little excitement Wednesday afternoon, when staff noticed a brown bat hanging on the wall inside the library. This is actually the second library bat since I've worked here - this time I got some photos and a video of the rescue.

Sadly, this photo is a little blurry - I was trying to sneak around the library and take pictures without alerting patrons to what I was doing. We had no idea how people would react.

Eventually I was able to get pretty close - the bat was either asleep or indifferent, because at one point a man sat on the bench right below him with no response.

We called animal control, but they had already closed for the day, so one of our maintenance guys volunteered. He got a butterfly net from the Children's Room display closet, a piece of cardboard from the recycle bin, and got the bat out of the building - with no injuries.

Make sure you turn the sound on when watching the video - you can hear the bat screeching/chirping about being in the net.

9 Responses to “Bat in the Library!”

Bats really have an undeserved bad reputation. For the most part, bats are like many other wild animals. They fear humans, they don’t want trouble, and they’ll try and stay out of the way until they think it’s safe. Since they’re mostly nocturnal, your critter there was probably dozing most of the time on that wall. No doubt he/she had been trying to figure a way out for a while and that kind of activity will tucker out a small bat like that one.

Glad y’all got it out without too much incident. The whole “he’s more afraid of you than you are of him” thing really holds true here!

I hate to be a downer, but that is somewhat peculiar behavior for a bat. You might consider talking to your local board of health. In the county where I work there is a huge children’s hospital named after the daughter of some rich guy whose young daughter died from rabies. They had shooed a bat out of her bedroom, but there was no visible indication she had been bitten until she got sick and died.

@Liam: The odd thing was that staff was positive he wasn’t there earlier in the day. We don’t know where he came from, but he seemed healthy enough up close – even still, I do wish animal control worked better hours.

@Stacey: That made me laugh too. Not much phases him – he didn’t even realize I was recording him until I showed him the video.

@Jarod: ha – we had to look around a bit, but we knew we had one in the building.

@Penny: Wow, a chicken? We have staff that bring in eggs from the chickens they keep at home, but that’s the closest we’ve come. The only animals I know that we’ve had are bats, mice, and a lady who kept bringing in her dog claiming it was a service animal, but it clearly was not. (We also have an annual Childrens program farm animal petting zoo, but that doesn’t count.)